By Wisdom Mumera
Last week a clip appeared on Zimbabwe`s state television from a meeting of financial beings, boards and bosses held at Delta’s Mandel Center. They were sharing ideas for the don’t-knoweth-time. One of the speakers, Barclays managing director Gideon Guvamatanga delivered a wise statement which I found both simple and yet enlightening that for all its being a cliché that has been repeated in different styles, its center still holds true.
The gist of what he said went something like this.
“Countries give us money because they see the potential for an investment return in us not because they love us and that applies even at a personal level”.
It’s the absence of a firm grasp of this truth behind the emotional abortion of ourselves from the larger womb of some Western related unions.
To quote a secular verse so as to strengthen this point, in the novel The Godfather, the Corleone family comes to the understanding that the shooting of Vito Corleone the family head, by a rival Mafia family, is simply a business issue that has to be replied in the same manner. All manner of emotions are stifled for the sake of business progression.
Down we come into the real world of our financially misshaped country, the first things that we have done are the wholesome disengagements from every likelihood of reconciliation with an assortment of populist jauntings, yappings and finger jabbing.
For everyone of Minister Chinamasa’s try at financial understanding with the foreigners we have unbalanced the scales with another volley of uncalled for emotionalism.
And as Kamurai Mudzingwa wrote in his article in the Daily News, we have mistaken isolation for sovereignty. For all the emotions that Western actions can evoke in us there is still need for us to indentify them as mere business actions for the world has become a big global economic unit.
Manheru in his Saturday Herald article once described the global state of things as having made the universe a World Inc. It’s now business that runs politics not the other way round.
Since the implementation of sanctions the Western world has not stopped having a keen interest in Zimbabwe not because they love us and fear that we may die of hunger from the sanctions, but because they recognize the investment potential existing here.
It’s that factor that retains their interest in us and the removal of President Mugabe is not an agenda in itself, but a precursor to the creation of business combinations to which they see him as a stumbling block.
No nation under the sun loves us for the mere humanity of that fact. Not the Chinese, not the Iranians and not any other African country.
It’s the likelihood of investment returns to any nation that creates the affinity between us and them.
Currently the Ukrainians are in uproar after the Government ditched a European alliance for Russian connections. It has become more of a political issue but the underlying factor that drove that decision was an economic one.
The sum of financial returns in cancelled debts and so on, far outweighed anything else European.
Another European nation, recently agreed a contract with a Russian company Gazprom where it will take up a debt-saddled gas utility in exchange for receiving constant supply of gas. Russian president Vladimir Putin signed the agreement which costs a US$1 due to the financing required to renovate it later.
As recompense to the Russian government the country has already given the Americans who had a military base in that country notice to have vacated the country by July. That’s economics giving breathe to politics.
Continued running around in political circles with our economic mindsets cut off won’t result in any change. Political unions can create mergers but unless they are concretised by economic factors they won’t work much.
The biggest example is the huge wobbling body called the African Union (AU). A continental union of poor countries united more by geography and skin color than anything else.
People have wondered over and over why other states such as Botswana sell out to the West at will, why Nigeria, South Africa and Guinea sold out Libya; why the French are more effective in Central Africa Republic than anyone else, and the answer is plain.
For all the political unity there is between us as the formerly raped victims of European imperialism they exists little in the incentive of economic aid amongst our own selves to restrain each the other from running across the ocean to France or Britain.
A chicken, whose head is suddenly and swiftly cut off, if left on its own, will run around with the fury of an enraged bull banging against anything and everything, wings flapping with terror.
The frenetic bustle and hustle only ends when the spilling blood has run its course, with little left in the system to sponsor such a headless venture. Then it flaps down, falling to the ground and we can have chicken for dinner.
Such is the flappery that bedevils countries when facing financial problems. In their quest to resurrect the faint heart beat of their financial states they look for salvation from anywhere and since politics can be a suicidal union from skin solidarity they can easily ditch it for economic gains.
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